


The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

by prodigy



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Coping, Gen, Grief, fix-it (sort of), post-season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:07:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26737123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prodigy/pseuds/prodigy
Summary: After the Unknowing, Jonathan Sims discovers he's got one more chance at life--and so does Gertrude Robinson. Neither of them is quite what the other has come to expect. (Nor is the chance.)
Relationships: Gertrude Robinson & Jonathan Sims, Jonathan Sims & Tim Stoker
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23
Collections: Remix Revival 2020





	The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Three Sentence Ficlets (The Magnus Archives)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23219602) by [Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer). 



Oliver Banks was not sitting in the chair in Jon's hospital room. Neither was Georgie--and while he hadn't really been expecting the former, there was a smidgen of his consciousness (still groggy, and confused, and squeezed now with a tremendous headache) not to find the latter: not that he expected Georgie to worry over him round-the-clock, or anything like that, or Oliver Banks to lurk broodingly, but no one woke up in hospital hoping to just see... well, the hospital. A nurse in the room fiddling with a folder, who hadn't seemed to notice he was awake. The IV shunt taped and padded around his hand, the uncomfortable feel of the nasal cannula--and the lighting, _God._ Who wanted to die under lighting like that?

Who wanted to die ever, maybe: maybe that was what Oliver Banks would say. Jon didn't really have an answer to that. He just definitely didn't want to die under fluorescent light.

His hand was sore. He was afraid to move it, now that it'd occurred to him it had a needle in it: but it was sore and it throbbed and he tried not to think about the needle.

The nurse was still reading. Jon pondered what to do about that. This was his first time having to get someone's attention from a hospital bed, and the situation seemed awkward.

It was at this point that he realised he was dizzy; and it was at the point thereafter that he realised the nurse was already talking to him.

She was wearing blue or blue-green scrubs, and was probably petite. (It occurred to him here that he didn't have his glasses on.) She was saying: "... --wait, can you hear me?"

"I--" He was genuinely dumbstruck as to how to answer that. The awkwardness of _that_ question occupied him more than the hoarseness of his voice. "I mean, yes? I can now?"

The nurse moved back over to him. She might've also been taken aback by the awkward, mobile-phone-with-bad-reception nature of this exchange; all the same, she sat with her folder in the visitor's chair. Her hand brushed his forehead, maybe moving his hair aside. "Were you following any of that?" she said.

"I don't know. Probably not? What's 'that?'" Jon had been awake for about a hundred seconds; he was already in the middle of a defencive apology. He'd been raised to cooperate with doctors and nurses; unnervingly, one of them was already finding him intransigent. "I'm sorry, I--I'm still... it's possible there's some sort of drug..."

"Oh, there's definitely drugs," said the nurse with unusual indifference. "Jonathan Sims. --I'm sorry, I don't mean to be insensitive, but: riddle me this, what's your real name? What's your occupation, exactly?"

It was out of his mouth before he knew it. He was startled by the certain matter-of-factness of his own response: "No, I _am_ Jonathan Sims. I work at the Magnus Institute. My degree is in library sciences, technically, but I'm currently an archivist. There's a distinction--"

"Yes, I know. Thank you, I was just confirming." There was an aggrieved note in her voice, maybe a weary one; he heard and felt her get up again.

Jon frowned. He had a constellation of thoughts, but whenever he tried to focus on just one, it kept winking out. Finally he managed. "... I'm sorry, isn't that... on my chart?"

She was silent, maybe quizzical. He indicated her folder with his non-needled hand.

"Oh." She closed it. "This isn't your chart. I don't work here."

"What?"

"Mr Sims--Jonathan?--no, Mr Sims. Do you wear glasses? Let me find them for you. Can you walk?"

He sincerely doubted it.

"Well, we'll get you a temporary chair. And a discharge. Aha--they kept your frames on hand. How nice. These conscientious modern hospitals. Here you go."

The glasses slid onto Jon's face: Jon's prescription, Jon's frames, he could feel immediately. The hospital room was real, suddenly--not just the implication of a room but everything in it. Lights and flooring of the same depressing vintage. And--the woman standing next to him. She _was_ wearing scrubs, which didn't really make the situation clearer.

"Who are you?" he said. It felt dismal, and sort of inevitable, and also sort of relieving to discover this lacked force completely.

"We've got to get you out of here," she said by way of non-answer. "It's either me now or Elias later."

"Who _are_ you?"

The woman sighed. She was also wearing glasses, of a slightly cheaper brand; she removed them at this point to clean them on her scrubs, which might have just been a habit, or a stall. "Not Elias," she said. "What will it be?"

* * *

She--no longer wearing scrubs--pushed him in a flimsy hospital chair to a cab, and then that cab took them to a commuter train. It was early afternoon, apparently, a warm day for winter. He'd assumed it was going to be night. No one ever woke up in hospital in the early afternoon. But he had: she was expecting him to walk by the time he was getting into the cab, too, and by the time they were boarding the train he was grudgingly capable.

His body ached all over, like a few rounds of flu had had a go at it; the clothing she'd scrounged fit him poorly and itched. Maybe his skin was the thing that itched. Any bad feeling could overtake you if you just thought about it enough.

"You're all right," was her take on that. "No bed sores. No atrophy. You should see what happens to a person in a real coma, Mr Sims."

She had a point. Jon was still cold, though, and bundled his arms around himself: he was too hot and too cold at turns right now, favouring cold. And getting incredibly hungry. That was coming on like a rush.

"I'm not talking about anything else until you tell me who you are," he said, with a warier presence of mind.

The woman scrutinised him. There was something visually inconclusive about her, was the best way to put it--normal at first glance, but like she hadn't entirely finished loading. Like the graphics card wasn't up to the task of rendering her on short notice. It was the sort of thing that had upset Sasha James about Michael Shelley, once; it wasn't quite the same, though, and it actually wasn't quite upsetting. Something about her skated just under conscious notice.

Her hair was blonde, or grey. At the moment she was wearing a cardigan and gloves. Gloves were odd.

"My name is Gertrude Robinson," she said.

She gave him a moment to react, then looked sort of disappointed when this didn't garner as much of a reaction as she'd been expecting. It was a muted eyeroll-type disappointment, though, like she had just declared membership in a classic band it turned out he was too young to have heard of.

"So that makes you my successor," she said. "I think I remember you." (Jon still wasn't sure whether or not he appreciated her candour.) "Well, I'm afraid I was shot before I could train you, or anything like. We can talk about that later, though--I found my way back through the Unknowing, eventually, which poses some interesting existential questions that I'm frankly not very interested in. I still have work to do here. I heard you were supposed to be dead, which sounded familiar, and decided to look into it. And here we both are."

Jon leaned his head back against his seat, tired: and also interested. Over the short remainder of their trip he listened to her cursory explanation of what exactly she'd done--starting with what had happened to her ("a bullet, but I don't take it personally at this point" with a grimness that belied the words), the unreality that had arisen (and _poured_ ) from the Unknowing, and the consciousness she felt and the chance she took. "In retrospect, I don't know why I didn't take the chance to have never been dead in the first place," she mused. "That one shining chance at rewriting and what did I rewrite? I wrote myself a damned half-functional body, is what--"

And here she removed her gloves and showed him her ball-jointed mannequin hands, a substitute for what she couldn't salvage. He received this without fright, or even morbid titillation; something about her was so opposed to, so anathema to what he knew of the Stranger that he wondered if she'd truly stolen from it and run off untouched, or if she was more powerfully _of_ it than anything else he'd met. He wondered why he was so cavalier about this, and if his headache was going to abate at any point.

Jon rested his head against the window. Some of Gertrude's strange in-between state wasn't just things like her hands, he noticed--her _age_ was indeterminate. Normally when one said that of a person, it was a compliment. This was just... true, like she was stuck or spliced between several things. But it was all skin and hair and voice. It was hard to say.

She was aware of the oddness of this conversation too, because she said: "Well, I apologise. I know it's probably a great deal." This came out more stiffly than the rest. She clearly wasn't accustomed.

"It's always a lot," he said. "It's been a lot for a while."

"Yes," she said, simply.

A thought finally crossed Jon's mind. He was aware it was a bit tardy, and determined not to be ironic about it all the same. "Did you compel me?"

"Just once, back in the hospital." Gertrude smiled in a way that didn't reach her eyes. "I'll keep it to a minimum."

"You mentioned Elias. Is he... should I be worried?"

"What, about his health? No, I know what you meant." Gertrude lowered the hand she'd held up, her face turned aside to her part of the window. In this light she looked sort of ordinary, or at this angle--or rather, she looked the age she'd been when he'd met her, when he'd hardly paid attention, something that almost slotted into his normal life, or the tatters of it. "He's staved off for a time. He's actually in jail, do you know? Facing some very slow charges. Mostly of murdering me--which he did, obviously, but I suppose I could walk in and save him a little trouble. --Which I'm not going to, mind."

Jon laughed.

"Of course, he's still going to get out. He'll walk out whenever he likes. This sort of thing is a game to him."

This was more than Jon felt like thinking about--Elias in general was a person he was hoping to go a day in recent memory without having to consider, but he hadn't had that luxury. He wasn't really expecting it; and moreover, it had crossed his mind, now, that Gertrude probably didn't have it either. That was kind of depressing. He'd always imagined--

\--well, he didn't know what he'd imagined about Gertrude Robinson. But this was all a bit unreal.

"Does he know?" he said, glancing back at her.

"In a broader sense," said Gertrude, "if you're talking about Elias, the answer to that has an unfortunately higher-than-average likelihood of being 'yes.' Does he know about me being alive, you mean?"

Jon nodded.

"Oh, yes." It had been a tinge before; now her answer was properly _seared_ , scorched briefly and unmistakably against the fire of a deep, sardonic bitterness. "He knows. It's impossible for him not to. He and I, we'll always be aware of the other one's presence on the mortal coil. It comes with the package."

Jon didn't know what to say to that. It didn't seem like something that had been intended for him, in particular--just intended to be said, something he should have been used to by now. Oddly it was awkward, coming from Gertrude Robinson of all people. It felt like a room he didn't want to be in.

She eyed him, too. "But there's you too now," she said. "I suppose you're part of the deal, now, aren't you?"

He was. The trouble was, he was. There really wasn't a better way to put it.

* * *

In the suburb, or exurb, where they got off the train was a safe house--or a house, anyway. The house was furnished and barren, but a cheery and eerie kind of barren: decorated but only with plastic plants and plastic fruit, Ikea-looking rugs, bright abstract patterns. No books, no television, no electronics at all except for the landline and the microwave; it took a few minutes after she'd let him in to look around for him to realise the place had been stripped of mirrors, too, all except for a hallway toilet. The place put him in mind of a bunker, if the occupants were okay with spending nuclear winter sitting and staring at the wall.

She did have a tablet PC, which she poked around on in the kitchen while he freshened up. This came as a surprise. For some reason, Gertrude Robinson knowing her way around a tablet was more shocking to him than Gertrude Robinson back from the dead.

Jon came back to discover that she'd been ordering food. He stood around while she explained, and until she told him drily that he could sit down; at which point he noticed that he was still hovering, and relocated himself silently to the sofa as to not be hovering. She drifted after, settling in a wingback chair.

While they were waiting for the food, he looked over the room once more, and the decor. It felt like his ability to wonder was coming back to him, or maybe his ability to push wondering a little further--and it didn't feel like it was the Unknowing, his coma, his hospitalisation that had taken this away, but rather that it had gone from him sometime before that. Maybe a year. Maybe more years than that. It was a seeped-in weariness he'd become so used to. He'd been a child who leapt through stacks of books in a fortnight like taking stairs three at a time; at some point he'd become an adult who dreaded opening an envelope, just because there was something new in it, something he had to conceive of all over again.

( _I think I'm getting stupider_ , he said to Georgie five years after school.

 _I think that's depression_ , said Georgie.)

At least he still remembered all the good Georgie advice he'd ignored. Heaven forfend. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fingers; "Is the mirror and book policy because of Elias?" he said.

"Yes."

"Does it work?"

"A bit," said Gertrude, with a little shrug of one shoulder. "It's better than nothing. Though I tend to assume as a default policy that anything you know," she eyed him, "is something he probably also knows. You should too. I'm a little luckier there, but you I think he considers something of an external hard-drive."

The flippancy of the phrasing, even Jon knew, was supposed to cut the message a little. It didn't work. He knew humiliation--the windedness was very familiar, like a blow to the stomach. He even felt the rising lash of resentment. It just didn't rise far enough, though; it was like with books. Once he had a spiteful remark ready at hand anytime someone handled his dignity roughly. Once he read all of the Discworld City Watch books in three weeks, too. 'Once' lots of things. He was just silent.

She winced like he had, anyway. "I'm sorry. For what it's worth, no one deserves him, but you get the brunt of it and you deserve it even less."

He said nothing to that either.

"I'm trying to make things right," she said.

"Am I going to survive things being made right?" This came dully, without him even really thinking about it. And since he was in for a penny, he added: "Tim died trying to make things right, didn't he? He's dead, right?"

She looked away, in way of answering that.

Jon sagged on the couch. It seemed better than crumpling, but also more wretched. You knew you were a flimsy person when you couldn't even manage a good crumple.

"And now? Are things right?" he said, a bit nastily.

Gertrude Robinson leaned her elbow on the edge of the armchair. The Ikea bunker decor really wasn't helping her the rest of the way out of the Uncanny Valley. "God damn it, Sims, I'm trying. Do you know I can't be everywhere at once? I don't scoop young patients out of hospitals with the intent purpose of finding some godforsaken sacrificial use for them. You are a tremendous liability to anything I'm doing. No, I cannot guarantee you're going to survive this. I can't guarantee anyone's going to survive anything. As you may be aware, I'm not precisely a local master of the art. --I went out of my way to get you. Do as you like. There's butter chicken coming in a few minutes. _Don't_ touch my iPad."

Oddly enough, this made him feel a bit better.

* * *

Sleep should've been the last thing on his mind. He'd slept from August to February, it turned out, knocked out in a hot night and woken on a day without snow. Yet he was exhausted. He didn't feel like Briar Rose. He felt like he'd been beaten.

He fell asleep in the barrenest room in the house, a bedroom that played host to only a queen bed with a plump duvet and a floor lamp and a window with the shade drawn. The emptiness of the room was for safety, but it only set him worse on edge. He had a memory of a scary story someone had told him when he was nine or ten: a story of a man who went hiking in the wilderness, and when he was weary, came upon an empty and well-furnished cabin in the darkness. The bedroom was ready for his use but covered in odd, frightening paintings--

_\--Windows. They're going to be windows, aren't they? He's going to wake up in the morning, and they were windows._

And so they were. But this bedroom didn't have paintings. It didn't even have a toilet. A safe house for the vigilant in the world of Dread Powers--no apertures, no pictures, no touches of home. No home-ness at all, really.

That brought something else to mind unwelcome: the one university seminar he'd ever had on Sigmund Freud. Jon had been a sceptic. Freud was a crank, he'd said to his flatmate. There was a bit about the _unheimlich_ , though. The English translation was _uncanny_ but it lost something: the _uncanny_ meant here was the just-off-normal. Homely or home-ly, and then un-home-ly. Why horror was always set in houses, the lecture went--they're supposed to be home-ly. The horror happens when you notice it's not.

Despite his thoughts' best effort, his body dragged him down to sleep.

Jon woke in a panic, looking for something--and he realised the something was someone. The last he remembered was Tim and the detonator. You think about it so many times, and yet you know, you _know_ the first time you hear someone decide to die. Maybe they were ready for a long time. But they _decide._ The deep crack in Tim's voice with _You sound stressed. You know--_ The blood smeared on the knuckles of his hands. The setup to a punchline already determined.

"Tim Stoker," he said when he came down to the kitchen and Gertrude, in a different jumper, glanced up at him; "--Basira Hussain. Alice Tonner. And, and Melanie King, Martin Blackwood, Georgina Barker. Are any of them still alive? You have to tell me."

Gertrude was working on something; on second glance, it wasn't food, but dismantling and cleaning a gun. Jon startled backwards, still unused to the sight. She heard out the list, though, and once he was done she put aside her work without looking up. "Hussain, King, and Blackwood are alive," she said. "Though their work environment hasn't improved, I'm afraid. I can't precisely say whether or not Alice Tonner is alive. I don't know Georgina Barker."

"--My friend who has a cat."

She took up her chamois again. "I'm afraid the cat doesn't help me narrow things down."

"What do you mean, you don't know whether or not Daisy Tonner is alive?" He was surprised at his own drive, but the despair that had kept itself in back-of-the-mind had surged up as terror when he woke; _I can't bear to know_ came back as _I have to know, **now**_.

"She was a Hunter drawn into the Buried. Or so I've surmised. She was in possession of the keenest sense of course known to man, and is now in the inescapable labyrinth--I don't know what death really is, do you? And I don't know what the Buried really is. So I take it your question is whether she'll ever come out again. --I don't know. I doubt it."

Jon's breath made a noise. He had the childish instinct to bring his hands up to his mouth to cover it.

The cloth turned in Gertrude's hands. Not a task--maybe a nervous habit? It was hard to imagine from the way she spoke-- "Most of your friends have survived," she said with detachment. "I suppose there's both less and more you could ask for."

"Tim Stoker. I mentioned--you didn't mention Tim Stoker. He's really gone?"

"Yes," said Gertrude Robinson with the mercy of finality. "He is. I'm sorry."

He made another noise. He did cover this one up with both hands. It was the convulsion of a body that wanted to cry and used to be capable; this kind of wave would sink him into tears, once, and then tears had their own vicious momentum. Now that had gone the way of book-reading and lashing-out. It stranded him in the middle of something else instead, something that wasn't weeping but wasn't functioning, either, and left him breathing in a horrible artificial way.

Gertrude left him be with it--didn't leave the room, didn't say something, just sat there. At first he marvelled that this was actually a fairly kind thing to do; but when his breathing was a little more even again, he glanced at her and she still had the chamois in both artificial hands, doing the same makework thing. It was the first it occurred to Jon that _she_ didn't have a clue what to do either.

* * *

He made toast for himself, and then in afterthought added a sloppy, overcooked fried egg. He offered the other fried egg, mutely, to Gertrude; she contemplated it as though it were an existential question and then shook her head. It did put oddness back in mind, though, including the oddness of her looks. And the oddness of her being here at all.

He perched on a stool with a coffee cup and eventually formulated a question: "What do you mean, you don't know what death really is? You and I have both been dead now, haven't we?"

"Not really," said Gertrude.

"I don't understand. I talked to Oliver Banks--Oliver Banks talked to me, anyway."

Her grip on her instruments tightened, ever so fractionally. "Oliver Banks knows what you and I don't. That doesn't mean he conveyed them to you."

"How do you know?"

"Death is final, Mr Sims. Death is gone. It's the state of gone. It's absence. You and I, and all manner of people who've had some sort of divine or diabolical otherworldly _experience_ \--" The emotion in her voice was as startling as it was hard to interpret. "We've experienced _some_ thing. Something that isn't really being alive, perhaps. That doesn't mean we've been dead. There's no 'have been dead.' Death is final. Mortality is fin _ite_. Anything else is a stupid gothic fantasia. That's the point. Alice Tonner is something. You and I are each something. Timothy Stoker is dead. He's gone. There's no getting him back."

There was, again, the quality of an outburst in this: and, again, it made Jon feel better in a weird way. He held his coffee cup in both hands, drew his knees up to rest his feet on the bottom rung of the stool, and peered at Gertrude's mannequin hands. They were fiberglass, but after a little bit of observation he was pretty sure her feet were wooden. _At least I don't have fiberglass hands._ Number one on a stunted fucking thankfulness list.

"You're a hell of a grief counsellor," he observed out loud.

"Yes, well. I didn't dream of working with children."

"Surprisingly few people who work with children ever did." Jon gave her a pointed look. "You can tell from the education system. --Look. At least you're not a Stranger impostor? I've been thinking about it, but I actually feel more reassured about this as the hours go on. You definitely aren't."

"Am I not?" This touched Gertrude's voice with amusement, a little, and she studied him. When she'd fished him out she looked something like twenty-eight and sixty-five: right now she was hovering in the vicinity of forty, visually, for whatever reason. "--No, I'm not interested in the ontological question either, mind you, I'm accepting the reality I perceive. It's usually for the best. But I'm surprised _you_ are."

"Yes. You're awful."

This seemed like something Tim might say, which was part of what motivated Jon to say it. When it left his mouth, though, it didn't sound all frosty and dark with the fundamental weight of melancholy the way it would have from Tim, however, and he discovered it just sounded bitchy. He also was appalled to find he'd actually said it, and panicked at the prospect of her reaction.

However, Gertrude laughed--and then laughed again, helplessly amused while he stared at her. She nearly doubled at the counter, in a motion so ungainly it could only be human. Eventually she leaned forward on her elbows--"God! Good Lord. You know, your file doesn't make you sound like such a goddamned brat. I can't take any more of this in the morning hours, I'm going out. You stay here for now. Do you want a lolly? Cigarettes?"

"I'll take the cigarettes, thank you."

"You shouldn't. Those are bad for you," said Gertrude without much conviction. "All right, I'll be back soon. Stay in. Don't open the shades. There's books in my room if you get bored. Try not to be abducted or run back to Elias while I'm out."

* * *

He was already used to trying to make a space for Sasha at the table in his life. It was hard to say where the impulse came from--maybe the parents he didn't remember. His grandmother too, who was flimsier and greyer in his memory now than he'd ever imagined possible. The metaphor, probably, was from the famous Millay poem. All the dead sat at the table there, not speaking. But Sasha James didn't even sit. He didn't even remember her, not really. The Stranger had torn her out of life and filled the space up with caulking, with lies. When Jon realised, he'd made a sad little project of trying to remember her every day. Just a minute of thinking about Sasha. Someone should.

By the time it was all happening, with Tim, he was already starting to miss days.

With Tim it was different, though. When Jon pulled up his legs to cross them on the bed in the safe house, he could imagine Tim exactly leaning against the other wall. He could imagine Tim's face, too, brooding and weary and sceptical. Probably resentful of Jon's presence. He never could get away from Jon, could he? He never could get away from Elias--and he never could get away from Jon.

But this wasn't memory. It was just projection. He didn't know how Tim would react here, because as Gertrude Robinson said, Tim Stoker was absolutely and one-hundred-percent gone.

Gertrude came and went with groceries, and then came and went again on unknown business. Jon had found a dogeared paperback of one of the _Outlander_ books and was reading it, spitefully. See Elias try to read his mind on this one. He envisioned it as sort of a mass spam mailing to blackened, telepathic souls. Trouble was, this one was mid-series and he was struggling to keep track of Scotsmen.

The cover had the look and feel of a library clearance sale. He wondered for the first time at the house's previous occupants.

She was surprisingly ready to indulge his curiosity. "This was Adelard's house," she provided. "Adelard Dekker, his name was. A friend of mine. When he passed away, he willed this to me. I sold out most of his things, sent the proceeds to his sister and his niece--destroyed some others--but I kept the property. It's good to have your name on a deed and title somewhere. Helps if you don't live there."

"I've heard about him."

"I suppose you must have." Gertrude looked at him slant, a strange flick of her eyes.

"What was he like? I couldn't entirely tell from... I couldn't entirely tell from other people's mentions. He seemed like a good person."

Gertrude's attention flickered: to him, away from him, to the door, back again. She was never fully at ease. "What was he like? Hmm. Pragmatic. Christian. Stubborn. More of a sense of humour than you'd think."

There was a lot encompassed in that.

"He died trying to stop something bad from happening," she said. "Something terrible for the world. Like your friend. --Yes, he was a good person."

There wasn't much to say. Jon held up the paperback. "Is this his book?"

"What? No, that came in a bag at the junk shop with your clothes. Let me see that. Goodness, is that still Gabaldon? How many is she putting out?"

Jon left her to marvel at the determination of commercial writers and went out onto the patio, which he surmised he was allowed to do now. There was a wire table and two inhospitable wire chairs. He dropped himself into one and lit up, surveying the suburban neighbourhood. A lot of it wasn't inhabited; one of the houses on the row was up for sale. It wouldn't be a terrible place for a spy to live. An in-between place for in-between people.

He still had _An Echo in the Bone_ in his hand. He'd picked it, from the stack, because he remembered Tim talking about _Outlander_. It went like: _Oh, yeah, those. I mean they're tripe, but not that bad actually if you don't mind a bodice ripped? Kind of entertaining?_

_Yeah?_

_Well, disclaimer, they've got this whole part with spanking. Just a bit with an absolute loving shitload of spanking. Not really **you** , boss. --Sorry. You know it's break, we're technically off._

The trouble with dead people, there; you couldn't go back and correct all the stupid one-note things they thought about you. They sat at Edna St Vincent Millay's table forever, just thinking the same things they always thought. Jon opened the book, contrary; but he couldn't concentrate.


End file.
